Environment

We now have a Paris Agreement rulebook, where do we go from here? Insights on environmental policies from randomised impact evaluations

Development Matters Climate change, Natural Resources, policy , , ,

By Iqbal Dhaliwal, Executive Director, and Rebecca Toole, Senior Policy Associate, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

 

gas-pollutionAt the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2018 (COP24), parties agreed to a rulebook that lays out how governments will measure, report and verify emissions under the Paris Agreement. Now countries need to act — and know whether policies and programmes are meeting their climate goals.

Thanks to innovations in research design, improvements in measurement technology and an increasing political will to know what works, more opportunities to rigorously evaluate and learn from real-world environment and energy policies exist than many might think.

Take, for example, our work at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to ensure that policy is informed by scientific evidence. J-PAL is anchored by a network of 171 affiliated professors at more than 50 universities who conduct randomised impact evaluations to answer critical questions in social policy. Our Environment & Energy sector measures the real-world impacts of environmental and energy policies on everything from pollution reduction to climate change mitigation and resilience.

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Towards sustainable cocoa: financial solutions for smallholders in Côte d’Ivoire

Development Matters Africa, policy , , , ,

By Adeline Dontenville, Land-use and Finance Expert, EU REDD Facility, European Forest Institute

cocoa-1529742When you buy a chocolate bar, it’s quite likely that the cocoa in it came from Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s top producer. If so, it is almost certain that the cocoa plants were grown where dense rainforest once stood.

Expansion of cocoa production into new areas is amongst the main drivers of deforestation in Côte d’Ivoire. At current rates, the country will lose all its forest cover by 2034. Decoupling cocoa production from deforestation is therefore crucial if Côte d’Ivoire is to achieve its goals of producing zero-deforestation cocoa and restoring forest cover to 20% of its territory by 2030.

One solution for the Ivoirian government is agroforestry, a type of land management in which farmers grow not only crops but also a variety of trees for multiple purposes, like firewood, fruit and timber. It’s a way to produce cocoa while restoring forest cover, improving soil fertility and diversifying the income of producers.

But how can Côte d’Ivoire’s smallholders invest in agroforestry when they live below the poverty line and have limited access to finance? And how can large chocolate manufacturers that buy cocoa from smallholders help?
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The institutional key to step-up disaster risk management in Thailand

Development Matters Asia, Climate change , , , ,

By Andrea Colombo, Jr. Policy Analyst, and Chloé Stutzmann, Consultant, OECD Development Centre

thailand-water
Thailand, Nonthaburi flood, 2011.
Photo: Suwan Wanawattanawong / Shutterstock.com

The increasing exposure of people to disaster worldwide was a key issue during last week’s World Water Forum in Brasilia. By 2050, almost 2 billion people in the world will be at risk of floods. At the same time, between 5 and 6 billion people might live in areas that will be water-scarce.

Thailand is no exception to this global trend. The 2011 floods affected 16 million people and claimed over 1 000 lives. The economic damage accounted for over USD 9 billion in the city of Bangkok alone (OECD, 2015). In 2016, drought was declared in 14 provinces, and water rationing was imposed as major dams dropped to their lowest levels since 1994. Such flooding and drought moreover negatively affect agricultural production, especially in Thailand’s rural provinces in the North, the Northeast and the South regions, where agriculture’s share in GDP exceeded 20% in 2015, compared to the 9% national average.
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Bridging the green investment gap in Latin America: what role for national development finance institutions?

Development Matters Climate change, Development finance, Latin America/Caribbean, SDGs , , , , ,

By Maria Netto, Lead Capital Markets and Financial Institutions Specialist, Inter-American Development Bank, and Naeeda Crishna Morgado, Policy Analyst – Green Growth and Investment, OECD              

Green-investmentThe developing world urgently needs more and better infrastructure. Affordable and accessible water supply systems, electricity grids, power plants and transport networks are critical to reducing poverty and ensuring economic growth. The way new infrastructure is built over the next 10 years will determine if we meet the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement objectives. Considering the long lifespan of most infrastructure projects, the decisions developing countries make about how they build infrastructure are critical: we can either lock-in carbon intensive and polluting forms of infrastructure, or ‘leap frog’ towards more sustainable pathways.

Many countries in Latin America are making this shift: thirty-two of them have committed to cut their emissions and improve the climate resilience of their economies, in infrastructure and other sectors, through Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The cost is estimated at a staggering USD 80 billion per year over the next decade, roughly three times what these countries currently spend on climate-related activities. What is more, this is in addition to a wide investment gap for delivering development projects and infrastructure overall – the World Bank estimates that  countries in Latin America spend the least on infrastructure among developing regions in the world.
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Infrastructure, jobs, good governance: Bringing Africans’ priorities to the G20 table

Development Matters Africa, SDGs , , , , , , ,

By Michael Bratton, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and African Studies at Michigan State University and senior adviser to Afrobarometer, and E. Gyimah-Boadi, Executive Director of Afrobarometer and the Ghana Center for Democratic Development

 

blog 18july_1

Beyond the limelight and the headlines, the recent Group of 20 (G20) summit accomplished an important piece of business by launching the Compact with Africa. The next step is crucial: negotiating the priorities that the compact will address.

One key concept is that the compact is with – rather than for – Africa, implying that it will rely on true partnerships to pursue mutually agreed-upon goals.

With its contribution to a “20 Solutions” document presented to the G20 by a consortium of think tanks, the pan-African research network Afrobarometer is working to ensure that the compact will take into account what ordinary Africans say they want and need.

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We must co-create the future we want to see

Development Matters Climate change, policy , , ,

By Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone 

Emmanuel Faber participated in the
2017 International Economic Forum on Latin America and the Caribbean

Danone
Photo credit: Lionel Charrier/Livelihoods Funds

In 1972, Danone founder Antoine Riboud made a speech to French industry leaders in which he declared that “corporate responsibility doesn’t end at the factory gate or the company door” and called on them to place “industry at the service of people.” Today his words seem self-evident; at the time they were revolutionary.

Now more than ever, we know that we can only thrive as a business when people and planet thrive. It’s simple: If we don’t protect the environment, we won’t be able to secure resources to make our products. If we don’t empower people and support decent living conditions, our supplier and consumer bases will shrink. We cannot escape this interdependence. So, at Danone, we embrace it. This means that, wherever we operate, we work to foster inclusive and sustainable development through co-creation — that is, working with coalitions of actors on the ground to develop hybrid solutions to concrete problems.

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Green Industrialisation and Entrepreneurship in Africa

Development Matters Africa, Climate change , , , , , , ,

By Milan Brahmbhatt, Senior Fellow, New Climate Economy (NCE) and World Resources Institute1

Explore this topic further with the upcoming launch of the
2017 African Economic Outlook: Entrepreneurship and Industrialisation in Africa.
Stay tuned for details

Solar salesman in Gulu Uganda Photo credit James Anderson
Solar salesman in Gulu, Uganda. Photo credit: James Anderson

Policy makers across Africa have embraced industrialisation and economic transformation as keys to accelerate inclusive growth. They also increasingly see the need for economic transformation to deliver green growth – growth that does not endanger Africa’s natural environment in ways that reduce the welfare of present and future generations. Economic transformation and green growth depend on doing new things: making risky investments in new, unfamiliar sectors or products or adopting new, unfamiliar methods, processes, technologies, inputs or business models. All this depends crucially on the activity of entrepreneurs, who drive change through their innovation and risk-taking. Fostering entrepreneurship, including green entrepreneurship, is thus a key policy aim for African countries.

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